Jim Howick

I had high hopes for Stag (BBC Two, Saturdays) -- a three-part black comedy by some of the team responsible for the superb The Wrong Mans -- about a stag weekend gone hideously wrong in the wilds of the Scottish Highlands. Stag parties are so often, in my experience, the best reason for wishing you had been born a woman: all that pressure to show yourself the alpha male, among painfully mismatched, pumped-up lads you often barely know, having to drink more than you'd like, watching skanky whores that do the opposite of arouse you. Can't tell you how glad I am to have got past that stage of my life.

What Stag captured very well, I thought, was the sheer repellance that stag groups often exude. I could certainly identify with the character of Ian (Jim Howick), the outsider who turns up late, doesn't know anyone, and finds that merely to survive the weekend he's going to fall in with the alien banter and submit to the random rules of arrogant bullies led by Ledge (short for 'Legend', played with Flashmanesque swagger by JJ Feild). (Ledge is scripted as having been to Harrow. This is wrong. He would definitely have gone to Wellington -- at least as it was before Anthony Seldon came along and emasculated it with My Little Pony caringness classes.)

But I didn't quite buy the tone. Obviously, it was nice to see the tossers all being picked off, one by one, Deliverance-style by the locals. But I didn't feel they'd been shown doing quite enough to deserve it. For these things to work -- see also Southern Comfort -- you have genuinely to be persuaded that the natives are sufficiently psychopathic and inbred to enact this kind of mayhem; and also, I think, to find the victims sufficiently sympathetic for you to care rather than cheer when they get cut in half, disembowelled, etc.

Stag preview

The hunters become the hunted as each one is horribly eliminated, one gobby moron at a time.

The makers of The Wrong Mans go very dark indeed with this three-part drama, a twisted tale of a stag weekend gone horribly awry in the Scottish Highlands. Ian (Peep Show's Jim Howick) tags along for the festivities of his future brother-in-law who, it soon transpires, has a ghastly line in friends. When best man Ledge, a punchable City boy, mocks a gamekeeper once too often, they're left stranded. As if that wasn't bad enough, soon they're dispatched one by one, in grisly fashion.

TV preview: Stag, BBC2

I don't really need to tell you much about comedy chiller Stag. The cast should be enough of a selling point. Jim Howick, Reece Shearsmith, Rufus Jones and Tim Key as well as Stephen Campbell Moore, James Cosmo and Pilou Asbaek. If you don't know some of the names you'll certainly know the faces.

Stag: episode 1 review

From the producer and director of BBC Two comedy thriller The Wrong Mans comes another series that combines dark humour with a deadly chill.

Interview: cast of Stag

TV's latest genre-busting series sees a Highlands bachelor weekend become a bloody quest for survival. We brave the mud and drizzle to meet its cast.

Stag is 'Bullingdon Club meets The Revenant'

Hitting television screens later this week is a brilliant new dark comedy from BBC Two that evokes the likes of Boris Johnson and David Cameron with Tom Hardy and Leonardo DiCaprio on a nightmare weekend in Scotland.

Six main actors and supporting cast play a variety of roles in the Horrible Histories' take on William Shakespeare's lost years. The Bard had tried being in a band but it didn't work out so it's off to London for fame and fortune and a nasty Spanish Catholic plot to kill Queen Elizabeth I.

It's all a hoot with touches of Python, Blackadder and The Young Ones as the great and the good of Elizabethan England tread the boards. Damian Lewis does a cameo as Sir Richard Hawkins, Ben Willbond hams it up as King Philip II of Spain with his trio of assassins, miserable Christopher Marlow (Jim Howick) helps the Bard and Helen McCrory is all you hope for as Elizabeth I.

Great fun but will it fill the big screen?